A few years ago, a friend of mine who lives in a Mediterranean country was visiting upstate New York. As we rode around the countryside, he asked me why there was so much abandoned farmland. I told him small-dairy farmers once rented and worked those fields that we had just driven by (mostly three t...

Giving bees a break Just behind our house in Hartwick is a commons area of about eight acres. It’s privately owned, but Andy, the owner, lets people walk through this semi-wilderness parcel. This area has a small swamp and about four acres of orchard/meadow. The rest is pretty much goldenrod. Andy g...

Go back in history to the 1930s, where we can show that Delaware County produced more milk than any other county in the U.S. Fluid milk in cans was transported by trains to New York City. A large proportion of milk was made into butter right in Delaware County; much of the resulting skim milk was fe...

Two significant climate-related events are drawing a lot of my attention. The first one was an on-farm seminar which was written up in last week’s Country Folks. Elizabeth Tomlin wrote the article titled “Climate Smart Farming encouraged at twilight meeting”. The seminar was held last month at the M...

At the end of important football games the players on the winning team often take a bushel basket full of ice and an orange electrolyte-laden beverage and douse their coach’s head with it. This particular beverage is routinely consumed in large quantities by sweating athletes. Electrolyte packages a...

There’s a quotation that sustainable agriculturists (real and wannabe) throw at listeners during philosophical discussions: “The best fertilizer is the footprint of the farmer.” Nobody knows who was the first person to say that (or write it). But President Lyndon Johnson tweaked the truism into the ...

Recently, Thomas called me with some questions regarding soil tests results coming from five fields which he had sampled in late-June. On all the fields the soil type was primarily Mardin silt loam. According to the website https://soilseries.sc.egov.usda.gov , “The Mardin series consists of very de...

My Canadian cyber-sentry E. Ann Clark, PhD… retired agronomy professor from Ontario’s Guelph University… e-mailed me an article titled “Former ‘Billion Dollar Bug’ is Mounting a Come-back”. The sub-title read: “The corn rootworm pest has developed resistance to GM (genetically modified) Bt insectici...

This morning (Tuesday) Frank, one of my crop program advisees, called to tell me that he had finished first cutting. This Central New York farmer crops about 150 acres of mixed mostly grass hay baleage; most of that land is rented. He raises a few beef cattle, and works some off-farm at a machinery ...

On Dec. 15, 2017 a U.S. government weather forecaster said that La Niña conditions were predicted to continue in the Northern Hemisphere throughout Winter 2017-2018. During early autumn, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), an agency of the National Weather Service… in its monthly bulletin… stated: ...